Menu Mining: Salt Peanut Chocolate Cake at the Nickel Diner

best. cake. ever.

First let it be known I am really more of a pie person than a cake person. I’ll take a slice of cherry pie or a fruit tart before a piece of cake almost any time, but whenever I find myself downtown and it’s before 11pm (Tu-Sa), I try to stop by the Nickel for the salt peanut chocolate cake. The Nickel, you may know, is notorious for its maple glazed bacon doughnut, and I mean no disrespect to that doughnut or to the awesome red velvet cake or homemade pop tarts or any of the other amazing eat-dessert-first offerings at the Nickel, but my heart belongs to the salt peanut chocolate cake. The love child of Betty Crocker and Elvis, this is the king of LA desserts. First you’ve got the cake itself, a good dense chocolate cake, and then you’ve got the peanut brittle peanuts crushed on top, but what really makes it is the peanut butter/cream filling with crushed up potato chips between the layers. Seriously, if I lived downtown someone would need to perform an intervention. I would become immense, and it would be the Nickel Diner’s fault.